Vegetarianism – the wanton ingestion of nothing but non-meat – sometimes produces or provokes antipathy, hostility and disgust. Researchers have struggled to understand why. In 1945, as the second world war was ending, US Army Major Hyman S Barahal, chief of the psychiatry section of Mason general hospital in Brentwood, New York, issued a report called The […]
Category: Extra-Improbable columns
Our columns in other publications — The ‘Feedback’ column in New Scientist magazine, beginning in September 2022, and the “Improbable Research”column that ran for 13 years in The Guardian newspaper.
How do pedestrians avoid collisions?
As you walk city streets, frustrated at why those other pedestrians behave so frustratingly, be aware that scientists are trying to improve the situation, but are making progress only in slow steps. Dr Taku Fujiyama [pictured here, receiving an award], one of the modern masters in this endeavour, is a lecturer at University College London’s Secret […]
The research that’s on everyone’s lips: Lip prints
They are on everyone’s lips always, and sometimes on a shred of evidence in a murder trial, and occasionally in the title of a scientific report. Lip prints have become the subject of formal study. That formal study has a formal name: cheiloscopy. Basic questions still nag at cheiloscopists. A Portuguese population lip print patterns […]
How gold wedding rings go missing abrasively
A gold wedding band symbolises permanence, but bits of it disappear as a marriage endures, scraping against the marital skin every moment that metal and finger convene. Georg Steinhauser, a chemist at Vienna University of Technology, calculated how much goes missing, how quickly and at what cost. Steinhauser’s study, Quantification of the Abrasive Wear of a Gold Wedding […]